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Just as I was getting into the swing of things with a few quick fire posts I ended up needing to focus on work due to some important project pieces. Coupled with that, I caught a dreaded man-flu style bug over the weekend which broke me a little this week. Posts on Alexa Skills and a little sideline C# project (WinForms, just for fun!) are in the fold and will be with you in the next week.

I’ve been taking some time out to focus on a) learning a new domain/related technologies to make sure I have a solid footing in my new role and b) having some time out over the holidays. As such, it’s been hard to focus on creating new blog content, so apologies for that – but I really wanted to zero in on not screwing up (as ‘New Year, no job’ would suck royally!). Let’s talk about new content; this is something that has been a core focus of mine over the last few days, and I want to put an action plan in place to address this lack of ‘juicy goodness’. A rough agenda seems like an important place to start; to that end, here’s the roundabout plan for the coming month (in which I look to target getting out 1 post a week, as I envisage these being small-ish pieces):

These are the general themes I’m looking to cover; of course, I’ll do a switcheroo if something incredible crops up that I absolutely need to talk about, but at least there is a framework in place.

At the end of February, I’ll then have a rethink about the coming months and see if there are larger subject matters that would be cool to tackle. If and when behemoth style subjects are covered, I will most likely look to split it into a series of posts, to keep things regular.

I hope the New Year finds you all well regardless and I look forward to getting back up to snuff with content in the coming months.

Where have I been you may ask! Apologies for the lack of content, we’ve (included my wife in the equation here) hit a sizeable brick wall of work.

I think this has been mentioned previously, but I’ve recently started a new position and this has involved me spending a good dollop of time getting acclimatised; in particular finding my way around Amazon Web Services (which I’m having a super time with by the way!).

Coupled with this, I’m incredibly busy ploughing through work items for my wife’s business website, frogandpencil, using the magic of a (beastly) Trello board.

What does this mean for bearandhammer posts? Well, I’m kind of hoping that as I work my way through website tasks for frogandpencil and keep chewing AWS related subjects at work that a handful of small posts will come out in the wash, before normal service is resumed (i.e. the larger post on Web API).

So, with any luck, I’ll have something new plastered up on here soon enough. In the meantime, happy coding!

With the holidays almost upon us I just wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year!

If possible, I will do my best to crank out a further post between now and the New Year. Here’s a teaser for the first part of the year (likely approximately the first quarter), taken from my original ‘pot of things’ to cover with a few additions that are taking precedence, based on current interests:

Continued prodding around in F# (likely starting with charting as promised).

The Razor View Engine (basic overview).

An Arduino starter project.

Deeper dives into JavaScript (in the build up to some exams…more to follow here).

As an extension to this, I want to do some ES6 coverage.

A return to Unity (I’ll probably do a big hit around the start of Spring).

Plus other things from my original cooking pot, including Udemy courses and sneak peaks on other libraries/utilities as I can, etc.

I may well revise my posting frequency a little also. After planning on doing two posts a week I’ve become acutely aware that I’m not really hitting that mark, so I’ll either go down to one post a week or learn to produce posts faster (and better!). We’ll have to see how all of this pans out.

Rather miraculously, an entire year has rolled around since the inception of bearandhammer!

I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone following this blog, and those keeping up on Twitter and Facebook, it means the world to me so a big thumbs up to you all. This blog has brought in over eleven hundred views and over seven hundred visitors; I’m very humbled by the levels or interest, which are truly beyond anything I could have imagined.

I’ll keep the content coming and will try to cover as many interesting topics as I can find, to the highest quality possible.

It only dawned on me today that, rather sneakily, I’ve hit my official quarter century in the ‘blog post’ count department. Thinking back to my original goals when starting this up it’s nowhere near where I planned to be (getting on for nearly a whole year after starting this little adventure); but I’m happy to have hit this milestone nevertheless.

Thanks to my followers and all of you out there who have (hopefully not painfully so) joined my through this journey so far. I’m pushing eight hundred views now and would like to get to a thousand before the year is out; so here’s to fighting the good fight and all things code and geek related…

I’ve been away mashing keys and helping my wonderful wife get started with her super-awesome Wedding Stationery business. It’s early days, and there is still plenty to do, but here is some shameless link touting: